For almost nine months, I have been trying to
set up an interview with him - traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice,
and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who
can arrange a meeting.

Among other things, I want to answer a burning
question:

What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of
thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the
vast scope of the government's domestic surveillance programs?

In May I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU
attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow
and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid
days over several weeks.

It is the most time that any journalist has been
allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013.

But the finer details of the rendezvous remain
shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where or
when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are set...

Edward Snowden

June
13, 2014.

by Platon

I am staying at
the Hotel Metropol, a whimsical sand-colored monument to
pre-revolutionary art nouveau.

Built during the time of Czar Nicholas II, it
later became the Second House of the Soviets after the Bolsheviks took over
in 1917. In the restaurant, Lenin would harangue his followers in a
greatcoat and Kirza high boots.

Now his image adorns a large plaque on the
exterior of the hotel, appropriately facing away from the symbols of the new
Russia on the next block - Bentley and Ferrari dealerships and luxury
jewelers like Harry Winston and Chopard.

I've had several occasions to stay at the Metropol during my three decades
as an investigative journalist.

I stayed here 20 years ago when I interviewed
Victor Cherkashin, the senior KGB officer who oversaw American spies
such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. And I stayed here again in 1995,
during the Russian war in Chechnya, when I met with Yuri Modin, the
Soviet agent who ran Britain's notorious
Cambridge Five spy ring.

When Snowden fled to Russia after stealing the
largest cache of secrets in American history, some in Washington accused him
of being another link in this chain of Russian agents. But as far as I can
tell, it is a charge with no valid evidence.

I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to
a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii - in my case, as part of three
years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War.

Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the
whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally
eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.

I testified about the program in a closed
hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional
investigation that led to sweeping reforms of U.S. intelligence abuses in
the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book
about the NSA.

At several points I was threatened with
prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden
is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried
out).

Since then I have written two more books about
the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover
stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries.

But in all my work, I've never run across anyone quite like Snowden. He is a
uniquely postmodern breed of whistle-blower. Physically, very few people
have seen him since he disappeared into Moscow's airport complex last June.
But he has nevertheless maintained a presence on the world stage - not only
as a man without a country but as a man without a body.

When being interviewed at the South by Southwest
conference or receiving humanitarian awards, his disembodied image smiles
down from jumbotron screens.

For an interview at the TED conference in March,
he went a step further - a small screen bearing a live image of his face was
placed on two leg-like poles attached vertically to remotely controlled
wheels, giving him the ability to "walk" around the event, talk to people,
and even pose for selfies with them.

Of course, Snowden is still very cautious about
arranging face-to-face meetings, and I am reminded why when, preparing for
our interview, I read a recent Washington Post report.

The story, by Greg Miller, recounts daily
meetings with senior officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, all
desperately trying to come up with ways to capture Snowden.

One official told Miller:

"We were hoping he was going to be stupid
enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say:
'You're in our airspace. Land.' "

He wasn't.

And since he disappeared into Russia, the U.S.
seems to have lost all trace of him.

I do my best to avoid being followed as I head to the designated hotel for
the interview, one that is a bit out of the way and attracts few Western
visitors. I take a seat in the lobby facing the front door and open the book
I was instructed to bring.

Just past one, Snowden walks by, dressed in dark
jeans and a brown sport coat and carrying a large black backpack over his
right shoulder.

He doesn't see me until I stand up and walk
beside him.

"Where were you?" he asks. "I missed you."

I point to my seat.

"And you were with the CIA?" I tease.

He laughs.

Snowden is about to say something as we enter the elevator, but at the last
moment a woman jumps in so we silently listen to the bossa nova classic "Desafinado"
as we ride to an upper floor.

When we emerge, he points out a window that
overlooks the modern Moscow skyline, glimmering skyscrapers that now
overshadow the seven baroque and gothic towers the locals call Stalinskie
Vysotki, or "Stalin's high-rises."

He has been in Russia for more than a year now.
He shops at a local grocery store where no one recognizes him, and he has
picked up some of the language. He has learned to live modestly in an
expensive city that is cleaner than New York and more sophisticated than
Washington.

In August, Snowden's temporary asylum was set to
expire. (On August 7, the government announced that he'd been granted a
permit allowing him to stay three more years.)

Entering the room he has booked for our interview, he throws his backpack on
the bed alongside his baseball cap and a pair of dark sunglasses. He looks
thin, almost gaunt, with a narrow face and a faint shadow of a goatee, as if
he had just started growing it yesterday.

He has on his trademark Burberry eyeglasses,
semi-rimless with rectangular lenses. His pale blue shirt seems to be at
least a size too big, his wide belt is pulled tight, and he is wearing a
pair of black square-toed Calvin Klein loafers. Overall, he has the look of
an earnest first-year grad student.

Snowden is careful about what's known in the intelligence world as
operational security.

As we sit down, he removes the battery from his
cell phone. I left my iPhone back at my hotel. Snowden's handlers repeatedly
warned me that, even switched off, a cell phone can easily be turned into an
NSA microphone.

Knowledge of the agency's tricks is one of the
ways that Snowden has managed to stay free. Another is by avoiding areas
frequented by Americans and other Westerners. Nevertheless, when he's out in
public at, say, a computer store, Russians occasionally recognize him.

"Shh," Snowden tells them, smiling, putting a
finger to his lips.

Despite being the subject of a worldwide manhunt, Snowden seems relaxed and
upbeat as we drink Cokes and tear away at a giant room-service pepperoni
pizza. His 31st birthday is a few days away.

Snowden still holds out hope that he will
someday be allowed to return to the U.S.

"I told the government I'd volunteer for
prison, as long as it served the right purpose," he says.

"I care more about the country than what
happens to me. But we can't allow the law to become a political weapon
or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no
matter how good the deal. I'm not going to be part of that."

Meanwhile, Snowden will continue to haunt the
U.S., the unpredictable impact of his actions resonating at home and around
the world.

The documents themselves, however, are out of
his control. Snowden no longer has access to them; he says he didn't bring
them with him to Russia.

Copies are now in the hands of three groups:

First Look Media, set up by journalist
Glenn Greenwald and American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras,
the two original recipients of the documents

The Guardian newspaper, which also
received copies before the British government pressured it into
transferring physical custody (but not ownership) to The New York
Times

Barton Gellman, a writer for The
Washington Post. It's highly unlikely that the current custodians
will ever return the documents to the NSA

Edward Snowden explains in
his own words

why he decided to reveal
secret details of the domestic surveillance

being conducted by U.S.
intelligence services.

by Platon

That has left U.S. officials in something like a state of impotent
expectation, waiting for the next round of revelations, the next diplomatic
upheaval, a fresh dose of humiliation.

Snowden tells me it doesn't have to be like
this.

He says that he actually intended the government
to have a good idea about what exactly he stole. Before he made off with the
documents, he tried to leave a trail of digital bread crumbs so
investigators could determine which documents he copied and took and which
he just "touched."

That way, he hoped, the agency would see that
his motive was whistle-blowing and not spying for a foreign government.

It would also give the government time to
prepare for leaks in the future, allowing it to change code words, revise
operational plans, and take other steps to mitigate damage.

But he believes the NSA's audit missed those
clues and simply reported the total number of documents he touched - 1.7
million. (Snowden says he actually took far fewer.)

"I figured they would have a hard time," he
says. "I didn't figure they would be completely incapable."

"If Mr. Snowden wants to discuss his
activities, that conversation should be held with the U.S. Department of
Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges
against him."

Snowden speculates that the government fears
that the documents contain material that's deeply damaging - secrets the
custodians have yet to find.

"I think they think there's a smoking gun in
there that would be the death of them all politically," Snowden says.

"The fact that the government's
investigation failed - that they don't know what was taken and that they
keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers - implies to me that
somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that
was like, 'Holy shit.' And they think it's still out there."

Yet it is very likely that no one knows
precisely what is in the mammoth haul of documents - not the NSA, not the
custodians, not even Snowden himself.

He would not say exactly how he gathered them,
but others in the intelligence community have speculated that he simply used
a web crawler, a program that can search for and copy all documents
containing particular keywords or combinations of keywords.

This could account for many of the documents
that simply list highly technical and nearly unintelligible signal
parameters and other statistics.

And there's another prospect that further complicates matters: Some of the
revelations attributed to Snowden may not in fact have come from him but
from another leaker spilling secrets under Snowden's name. Snowden himself
adamantly refuses to address this possibility on the record.

But independent of my visit to Snowden, I was
given unrestricted access to his cache of documents in various locations.
And going through this archive using a sophisticated digital search tool, I
could not find some of the documents that have made their way into public
view, leading me to conclude that there must be a second leaker somewhere.
I'm not alone in reaching that conclusion.

Both Glenn Greenwald and security expert
Bruce Schneier - who have had extensive access to the cache - have
publicly stated that they believe another whistle-blower is releasing secret
documents to the media.

In fact, on the first day of my Moscow interview with Snowden, the German
newsmagazine Der Spiegel comes out with a long story about the NSA's
operations in Germany and its cooperation with the German intelligence
agency, BND.

Among the documents the magazine releases is a
top-secret "Memorandum of Agreement" between the NSA and the BND from 2002.

"It is not from Snowden's material," the
magazine notes.

Some have even raised doubts about whether the
infamous revelation that the NSA was tapping German chancellor
Angela
Merkel's cell phone, long
attributed to Snowden, came from his trough.

At the time of that revelation, Der Spiegel
simply attributed the information to Snowden and other unnamed sources.

If other leakers exist within the NSA, it would
be more than another nightmare for the agency - it would underscore its
inability to control its own information and might indicate that Snowden's
rogue protest of government overreach has inspired others within the
intelligence community.

"They still haven't fixed their problems,"
Snowden says.

"They still have negligent auditing, they
still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they're
coming from and they have no idea where they're going. And if that's the
case, how can we as the public trust the NSA with all of our
information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of
our lives?"

The Der Spiegel articles were written by, among
others, Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who was one of the first
journalists Snowden contacted.

Her high visibility and expertise in encryption
may have attracted other NSA whistle-blowers, and Snowden's cache of
documents could have provided the ideal cover. Following my meetings with
Snowden, I email Poitras and ask her point-blank whether there are other NSA
sources out there.

She answers through her attorney:

"We are sorry but Laura is not going to
answer your question."

The same day I share pizza with Snowden in a
Moscow hotel room, the U.S. House of Representatives moves to put the brakes
on the NSA.

By a lopsided 293-to-123 tally, members vote to
halt the agency's practice of conducting warrantless searches of a vast
database that contains millions of Americans' emails and phone calls.

"There's no question Americans have become
increasingly alarmed with the breadth of unwarranted government
surveillance programs used to store and search their private data," the
Democratic and Republican sponsors announce in a joint statement.

"By adopting this amendment, Congress can
take a sure step toward shutting the back door on mass surveillance."

It's one of many proposed reforms that never
would have happened had it not been for Snowden.

Back in Moscow, Snowden recalls boarding a plane
for Hong Kong, on his way to reveal himself as the leaker of a spectacular
cache of secrets and wondering whether his risk would be worth it.

"I thought it was likely that society
collectively would just shrug and move on," he says.

Instead, the NSA's surveillance has become one
of the most pressing issues in the national conversation.

President Obama
has personally addressed the issue, Congress has taken up the issue, and the
Supreme Court has hinted that it may take up the issue of warrantless
wiretapping.

Public opinion has also shifted in favor of
curtailing mass surveillance.

"It depends a lot on the polling question,"
he says, "but if you ask simply about things like my decision
to reveal Prism" - the program that
allows government agencies to extract user data from companies like
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo - "55 percent of Americans agree. Which is
extraordinary given the fact that for a year the government has been
saying I'm some kind of super-villain."

That may be an overstatement, but not by much.

Nearly a year after Snowden's first leaks broke,
NSA director Keith Alexander claimed that Snowden was,

"now being manipulated by Russian
intelligence" and accused him of causing "irreversible and significant
damage."

More recently, Secretary of State John Kerry
said that,

"Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a
traitor, and he has betrayed his country."

But in June, the government seemed to be backing
away from its most apocalyptic rhetoric.

In an interview with The New York Times, the new
head of the NSA, Michael Rogers, said he was "trying to be very
specific and very measured in my characterizations":

"You have not heard me as the director say,
'Oh my God, the sky is falling'."

Snowden keeps close tabs on his evolving public
profile, but he has been resistant to talking about himself.

In part, this is because of his natural shyness
and his reluctance about "dragging family into it and getting a biography."
He says he worries that sharing personal details will make him look
narcissistic and arrogant.

But mostly he's concerned that he may
inadvertently detract from the cause he has risked his life to promote.

"I'm an engineer, not a politician," he
says.

"I don't want the stage. I'm terrified of
giving these talking heads some distraction, some excuse to jeopardize,
smear, and delegitimize a very important movement."

by Platon

But when Snowden finally agrees to discuss his personal life, the portrait
that emerges is not one of a wild-eyed firebrand but of a solemn, sincere
idealist who - step by step over a period of years - grew disillusioned with
his country and government.

Born on June 21, 1983, Snowden grew up in the Maryland suburbs, not far from
the NSA's headquarters. His father, Lon, rose through the enlisted ranks of
the Coast Guard to warrant officer, a difficult path.

His mother, Wendy, worked for the U.S. District
Court in Baltimore, while his older sister, Jessica, became a lawyer at the
Federal Judicial Center in Washington.

"Everybody in my family has worked for the
federal government in one way or another," Snowden says. "I expected to
pursue the same path."

His father told me,

"We always considered Ed the smartest one in
the family."

It didn't surprise him when his son scored above
145 on two separate IQ tests.

Rather than spending hours watching television or playing sports as a kid,
Snowden fell in love with books, especially Greek mythology.

"I remember just going into those books, and
I would disappear with them for hours," he says.

Snowden says reading about myths played an
important role growing up, providing him with a framework for confronting
challenges, including moral dilemmas.

"I think that's when I started thinking
about how we identify problems, and that the measure of an individual is
how they address and confront those problems," he says.

Soon after Snowden revealed himself as a leaker,
there was enormous media focus on the fact that he quit school after the 10th
grade, with the implication that he was simply an uneducated slacker.

But rather than delinquency, it was a bout of
mononucleosis that caused him to miss school for almost nine months. Instead
of falling back a grade, Snowden enrolled in community college.

He'd loved computers since he was a child, but
now that passion deepened. He started working for a classmate who ran his
own tech business. Coincidentally, the company was run from a house at Fort
Meade, where the NSA's headquarters are located.

"I was driving in to work and I heard the
first plane hit on the radio," he says.

Like a lot of civic-minded Americans, Snowden
was profoundly affected by the attacks.

In the spring of 2004, as the ground war in Iraq
was heating up with the first battle of Fallujah, he volunteered for the
Army special forces.

"I was very open to the government's
explanation - almost propaganda - when it came to things like Iraq,
aluminum tubes, and vials of anthrax," he says.

"I still very strongly believed that the
government wouldn't lie to us, that our government had noble intent, and
that the war in Iraq was going to be what they said it was, which was a
limited, targeted effort to free the oppressed. I wanted to do my part."

Snowden says that he was particularly attracted
to the special forces because it offered the chance to learn languages.

After performing well on an aptitude test, he
was admitted. But the physical requirements were more challenging. He broke
both of his legs in a training accident.

A few months later he was discharged...

But of the Army, Snowden landed a job as a
security guard at a top-secret facility that required him to get a
high-level security clearance. He passed a polygraph exam and the stringent
background check and, almost without realizing it, he found himself on his
way to a career in the clandestine world of intelligence.

After attending a job fair focused on
intelligence agencies, he was offered a position
at the CIA,
where he was assigned to the global communications division, the
organization that deals with computer issues, at the agency's headquarters
in Langley, Virginia.

It was an extension of the network and
engineering work he'd been doing since he was 16.

"All of the covert sites - cover sites and
so forth - they all network into the CIA headquarters," he says. "It was
me and one other guy who worked the late shifts."

But Snowden quickly discovered one of the CIA's
biggest secrets:

Despite its image as a bleeding-edge
organization, its technology was woefully out-of-date.

The agency was not at all what it appeared to be
from the outside.

As the junior man on the top computer team,
Snowden distinguished himself enough to be sent to the CIA's secret school
for technology specialists.

He lived there, in a hotel, for some six months,
studying and training full-time. After the training was complete, in March
2007, Snowden headed for Geneva, Switzerland, where the CIA was seeking
information about the banking industry.

He was assigned to the U.S. Mission to the
United Nations. He was given a diplomatic passport, a four-bedroom apartment
near the lake, and a nice cover assignment.

It was in Geneva that Snowden would see firsthand some of the moral
compromises CIA agents made in the field. Because spies were promoted based
on the number of human sources they recruited, they tripped over each other
trying to sign up anyone they could, regardless of their value.

Operatives would get targets drunk enough to
land in jail and then bail them out - putting the target in their debt.

"They do really risky things to recruit them
that have really negative, profound impacts on the person and would have
profound impacts on our national reputation if we got caught," he says.

Because of his job maintaining computer systems
and network operations, he had more access than ever to information about
the conduct of the war.

What he learned troubled him deeply.

"This was
the Bush period, when the
war on terror had gotten really dark,"
he says. "We were torturing people; we had warrantless wiretapping."

He began to consider becoming a whistle-blower,
but with Obama about to be elected, he held off.

"I think even Obama's critics were impressed
and optimistic about the values that he represented," he says. "He said
that we're not going to sacrifice our rights. We're not going to change
who we are just to catch some small percentage more terrorists."

But Snowden grew disappointed as, in his view,
Obamadidn't follow through on his lofty rhetoric.

"Not only did they not fulfill those
promises, but they entirely repudiated them," he says.

"They went in the other direction. What does
that mean for a society, for a democracy, when the people that you elect
on the basis of promises can basically suborn the will of the
electorate?"

It took a couple of years for this new level of
disillusionment to set in.

By that time - 2010 - Snowden had shifted from
the CIA to the NSA, accepting a job as a technical expert in Japan with
Dell, a major contractor for the agency. Since 9/11 and the enormous influx
of intelligence money, much of the NSA's work had been outsourced to defense
contractors, including Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton.

For Snowden, the Japan posting was especially
attractive: He had wanted to visit the country since he was a teen.

Snowden worked at the NSA offices at Yokota Air
Base, outside Tokyo, where he instructed top officials and military officers
on how to defend their networks from Chinese hackers.

by Platon

But Snowden's disenchantment would only grow.

It was bad enough when spies were getting
bankers drunk to recruit them; now he was learning about targeted killings
and mass surveillance, all piped into monitors at the NSA facilities around
the world.

Snowden would watch as military and CIA drones
silently turned people into body parts. And he would also begin to
appreciate the enormous scope of the NSA's surveillance capabilities, an
ability to map the movement of everyone in a city by monitoring their MAC
address, a unique identifier emitted by every cell phone, computer, and
other electronic device.

Even as his faith in the mission of U.S. intelligence services continued to
crumble, his upward climb as a trusted technical expert proceeded.

In 2011 he returned to Maryland, where he spent
about a year as Dell's lead technologist working with the CIA's account.

"I would sit down with the CIO of the CIA,
the CTO of the CIA, the chiefs of all the technical branches," he says.
"They would tell me their hardest technology problems, and it was my job
to come up with a way to fix them."

But in March 2012, Snowden moved again for Dell,
this time to a massive bunker in Hawaii where he became the lead
technologist for the information-sharing office, focusing on technical
issues.

Inside the "tunnel," a dank, chilly,
250,000-square-foot pit that was once a torpedo storage facility, Snowden's
concerns over the NSA's capabilities and lack of oversight grew with each
passing day.

Among the discoveries that most shocked him was
learning that the agency was regularly passing raw private communications -
content as well as metadata - to Israeli intelligence. Usually information
like this would be "minimized," a process where names and personally
identifiable data are removed.

But in this case, the NSA did virtually nothing
to protect even the communications of people in the U.S..

This included the emails and phone calls of
millions of Arab and Palestinian Americans whose relatives in
Israel-occupied Palestine could become targets based on the communications.

(The operation was reported last year by The
Guardian, which cited the Snowden documents as its source.)

Another troubling discovery was a document from NSA director Keith Alexander
that showed the NSA was spying on the pornography-viewing habits of
political radicals. The memo suggested that the agency could use these
"personal vulnerabilities" to destroy the reputations of government critics
who were not in fact accused of plotting terrorism.

The document then went on to list six people as
future potential targets. (Greenwald published a redacted version of the
document last year on the Huffington Post.)

Snowden was astonished by the memo.

"It's much like how the FBI tried to use
Martin Luther King's infidelity to talk him into killing himself," he
says. "We said those kinds of things were inappropriate back in the
'60s. Why are we doing that now? Why are we getting involved in this
again?"

In the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church,
similarly shocked by decades of illegal spying by the U.S. intelligence
services, first exposed the agencies' operations to the public.

That opened the door to long-overdue reforms,
such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Snowden sees parallels
between then and now.

"Frank Church analogized it as being on the
brink of the abyss," he says. "He was concerned that once we went in we
would never come out. And the concern we have today is that we're on the
brink of that abyss again."

He realized, just like Church had before him,
that the only way to cure the abuses of the government was to expose them.

But Snowden didn't have a Senate committee at
his disposal or the power of congressional subpoena. He'd have to carry out
his mission covertly, just as he'd been trained.

The sun sets late here in June, and outside the hotel window long shadows are
beginning to envelop the city.

But Snowden doesn't seem to mind that the
interview is stretching into the evening hours. He is living on New York
time, the better to communicate with his stateside supporters and stay on
top of the American news cycle. Often, that means hearing in almost real
time the harsh assessments of his critics.

Indeed, it's not only government apparatchiks
that take issue with what Snowden did next - moving from disaffected
operative to whistle-blowing dissident. Even in the technology industry,
where he has many supporters, some accuse him of playing too fast and loose
with dangerous information.

"I think he broke the law, so I certainly
wouldn't characterize him as a hero," he said. "You won't find much
admiration from me."

Snowden with General Michael
Hayden at a gala in 2011.

Hayden, former director of
the NSA and CIA,

defended U.S. surveillance
policies in the wake of Snowden's revelations.

Snowden adjusts his glasses; one of the nose pads is missing, making them
slip occasionally. He seems lost in thought, looking back to the moment of
decision, the point of no return.

The time when, thumb drive in hand, aware of the
enormous potential consequences, he secretly went to work.

"If the government will not represent our
interests," he says, his face serious, his words slow, "then the public
will champion its own interests. And whistle-blowing provides a
traditional means to do so."

The NSA had apparently never predicted that
someone like Snowden might go rogue.

In any case, Snowden says he had no problem
accessing, downloading, and extracting all the confidential information he
liked. Except for the very highest level of classified documents, details
about virtually all of the NSA's surveillance programs were accessible to
anyone, employee or contractor, private or general, who had top-secret NSA
clearance and access to an NSA computer.

But Snowden's access while in Hawaii went well beyond even this.

"I was the top technologist for the
information-sharing office in Hawaii," he says. "I had access to
everything."

Well, almost everything...

There was one key area that remained out of his
reach: the NSA's aggressive cyberwarfare activity around the world. To get
access to that last cache of secrets, Snowden landed a job as an
infrastructure analyst with another giant NSA contractor,
Booz Allen.

The role gave him rare dual-hat authority
covering both domestic and foreign intercept capabilities - allowing him to
trace domestic cyberattacks back to their country of origin. In his new job,
Snowden became immersed in the highly secret world of planting malware into
systems around the world and stealing gigabytes of foreign secrets.

At the same time, he was also able to confirm,
he says, that vast amounts of U.S. communications,

"were being intercepted and stored without a
warrant, without any requirement for criminal suspicion, probable cause,
or individual designation."

He gathered that evidence and secreted it safely
away.

By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden
was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock.
One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO - a division of NSA
hackers - had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the
core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the
midst of a prolonged civil war.

This would have given the NSA access to email
and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went
wrong, and the router was bricked instead - rendered totally inoperable.

The failure of this router caused Syria to
suddenly lose all connection to the Internet - although the public didn't
know that the U.S. government was responsible. (This is the first time the
claim has been revealed.)

Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what
Snowden calls an "oh shit" moment.

They raced to remotely repair the router,
desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the
sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because
the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.

Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on
restoring the nation's Internet than on tracking down the cause of the
outage.

Back at TAO's operations center, the tension was
broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth:

"If we get caught, we can always point the
finger at Israel."

Much of Snowden's focus while working for Booz
Allen was analyzing potential cyberattacks from China. His targets included
institutions normally considered outside the military's purview.

He thought the work was overstepping the
intelligence agency's mandate.

"It's no secret that we hack China very
aggressively," he says.

"But we've crossed lines. We're hacking
universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather
than actual government targets and military targets. And that's a real
concern."

The last straw for Snowden was a secret program
he discovered while getting up to speed on the capabilities of the NSA's
enormous and highly secret data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah.

Potentially capable of holding upwards of a
yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text, the 1
million-square-foot building is known within the NSA as the Mission Data
Repository. (According to Snowden, the original name was Massive Data
Repository, but it was changed after some staffers thought it sounded too
creepy - and accurate.)

Billions of phone calls, faxes, emails,
computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world
flow through the MDR every hour. Some flow right through, some are kept
briefly, and some are held forever.

The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more
disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the
works,
codenamed MonsterMind.

The program, disclosed here for the first time,
would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign
cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic
patterns indicating known or suspected attacks.

When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would
automatically block it from entering the country - a "kill" in cyber
terminology.

Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would
add a unique new capability:

Instead of simply detecting and killing the
malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire
back, with no human involvement.

That's a problem, Snowden says, because the
initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third
countries.

"These attacks can be spoofed," he says.

"You could have someone sitting in China,
for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating
in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What
happens next?"

In addition to the possibility of accidentally
starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy
because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to
secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from
overseas to people in the U.S..

"The argument is that the only way we can
identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we're
analyzing all traffic flows," he says.

"And if we're analyzing all traffic flows,
that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means
violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a
warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For
everyone, all the time."

(A spokesperson for the NSA declined to comment
on MonsterMind, the malware in Syria, or on the specifics of other aspects
of this article.)

Given the NSA's new data storage mausoleum in Bluffdale, its potential to
start an accidental war, and the charge to conduct surveillance on all
incoming communications, Snowden believed he had no choice but to take his
thumb drives and tell the world what he knew.

The only question was when...

by Platon

On March 13, 2013, sitting at his desk in the "tunnel" surrounded by
computer screens, Snowden read a news story that convinced him that the time
had come to act.

It was an account of director of national
intelligence James Clapper telling a Senate committee that the NSA
does "not wittingly" collect information on millions of Americans.

"I think I was reading it in the paper the
next day, talking to coworkers, saying, can you believe this shit?"

Snowden and his colleagues had discussed the
routine deception around the breadth of the NSA's spying many times, so it
wasn't surprising to him when they had little reaction to Clapper's
testimony.

"It was more of just acceptance," he says,
calling it "the banality of evil" - a reference to Hannah Arendt's study
of bureaucrats in Nazi Germany.

"It's like the boiling frog," Snowden tells
me.

"You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a
little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty, a little bit of
deceptiveness, a little bit of disservice to the public interest, and
you can brush it off, you can come to justify it.

But if you do that, it creates a slippery
slope that just increases over time, and by the time you've been in 15
years, 20 years, 25 years, you've seen it all and it doesn't shock you.
And so you see it as normal.

And that's the problem, that's what the
Clapper event was all about. He saw deceiving the American people as
what he does, as his job, as something completely ordinary. And
he was right that he wouldn't be punished for it, because he was
revealed as having lied under oath and he didn't even get a slap on the
wrist for it.

It says a lot about the system and a lot
about our leaders."

Snowden decided it was time to hop out of the
water before he too was boiled alive.

At the same time, he knew there would be dire consequences.

"It's really hard to take that step - not
only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I'm willing
to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground."

But he felt that he had no choice.

Two months later he boarded a flight to Hong
Kong with a pocket full of thumb drives.

The afternoon of our third meeting, about two weeks after our first, Snowden
comes to my hotel room.

I have changed locations and am now staying at the
Hotel National, across the street from the Kremlin and Red Square. An icon like the Metropol, much of Russia's
history passed through its front doors at one time or another.

Lenin once
lived in Room 107, and the ghost of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared chief of
the old Soviet secret police who also lived here, still haunts the hallways.

But rather than the Russian secret police, it's his old employers, the CIA
and the NSA, that Snowden most fears.

"If somebody's really watching me, they've
got a team of guys whose job is just to hack me," he says.

"I don't think they've geolocated me, but
they almost certainly monitor who I'm talking to online. Even if they
don't know what you're saying, because it's encrypted, they can still
get a lot from who you're talking to and when you're talking to them."

More than anything, Snowden fears a blunder that
will destroy all the progress toward reforms for which he has sacrificed so
much.

"I'm not self-destructive. I don't want to
self-immolate and erase myself from the pages of history. But if we
don't take chances, we can't win," he says.

And so he takes great pains to stay one step
ahead of his presumed pursuers - he switches computers and email accounts
constantly.

Nevertheless, he knows he's liable to be
compromised eventually:

"I'm going to slip up and they're going to
hack me. It's going to happen."

Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have
already committed some egregious mistakes.

Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to
open the encryption on a large trove of secrets from GCHQ - the British
counterpart of the NSA - that Snowden had passed to him.

So he sent his longtime partner, David
Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from
Poitras. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer
through London.

Tipped off, probably as a result of
GCHQ
surveillance, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and
questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive
containing 60 gigabits of data - about 58,000 pages of documents - was
seized.

Although the documents had been encrypted using
a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities
discovered a paper of Miranda's with the password for one of the files, and
they were able to decrypt about 75 pages. (Greenwald has still not gained
access to the complete GCHQ documents.)

Another concern for Snowden is what he calls NSA fatigue - the public
becoming numb to disclosures of mass surveillance, just as it becomes inured
to news of battle deaths during a war.

"One death is a tragedy, and a million is a
statistic," he says, mordantly quoting Stalin. "Just as the violation of
Angela Merkel's rights is a massive scandal and the violation of 80
million Germans is a nonstory."

Nor is he optimistic that the next election will
bring any meaningful reform.

In the end, Snowden thinks we should put our
faith in technology - not politicians.

"We have the means and we have the
technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at
all, without any policy changes."

The answer, he says, is robust encryption.

"By basically adopting changes like making
encryption a universal standard - where all communications are encrypted
by default - we can end mass surveillance not just in the United States
but around the world."

Until then, Snowden says, the revelations will
keep coming.

"We haven't seen the end," he says.

Indeed, a couple of weeks after our meeting, The
Washington Post reported that the NSA's surveillance program had captured
much more data on innocent Americans than on its intended foreign targets.

There are still hundreds of thousands of pages
of secret documents out there - to say nothing of the other whistle-blowers
he may have already inspired.

But Snowden says that information contained in
any future leaks is almost beside the point.

"The question for us is not what new story
will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"